Collected Poems

by Chuck Guilford

After the Fact

It’s hard to speak across that line. Here on this side, a few words, reminiscences, old photographs, keep the tension steady, draw the knot tight.

These cold October nights we still turn for consolation to images on paper. A shutter snaps. Every whisker. Every wrinkle captured. What machine could grind a lens to such perfection?

Even now up Rocky Canyon Road on sunlit afternoons, cool blue shadows settle into folds on the western hills, etching muscular ridges in available light. Is this all a dream? Or another life?

The negative of this one? Silver oxide. Stop bath. Fixer. Where is the room with the squeaking floor that darkened this morning’s coffee? A face familiar enough, though shadowed and out of focus. Storm scud. Wolf scat.

A possible line at the edge of a cloud, unraveling water vapor, palm fronds dried, tied in a knot: This crack between sleep and waking, this rubbing of mind against mind.